Lucy Lawless on the Evolution of Fake Blood

New Zealand-born Lucy Lawless of Spartacus, Battlestar Galactica and Xena: Warrior Princess fame says she has noted major advances in props and fake blood since she began her career.

“The technology now is so good. Things don’t taste like they used to. Karo syrup [as fake blood] was old school,” the 48-year-old actor told reporters during a recent interview at New York Comic Con.

“It doesn’t taste like it used to; it used to disgust you,” revealed the current co-star of Ash vs. Evil Dead. “It used to be like having treacle in your mouth and eventually – especially if you were working out in the heat with the flies and all this dirty stuff and you had this sweet, sickly stuff in your mouth – your disgust response gets really honed to a very sharp point. But it’s different now. Everything they use is beautifully crafted.

“In the old days, if they are throwing burning logs at you, they are throwing burning logs at you. Nowadays, it’s digital. We have a big fight in a colliery, like in an engine, like a boiler room, so there is coal everywhere. On Xena, we used to fall on actual coal. It hurt horribly. Nowadays, they have this stuff. It’s like falling onto a pillow. It looks like coal. It looks like igneous rock or something and it’s spongy and I’m so grateful to the art department for going to the trouble of not putting rocks underneath. … It’s so lovely not to be totally destroyed by the furniture.”

Original article by Karen Butler, UPI, October 25, 2016.